Spiritual Thirst
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” – Matthew 5:6
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” – Matthew 5:6
One Saturday morning when I was a teenager, three friends and I took our bikes and pedaled down to a local creek to go fishing. I do not remember what our bait was, but my pole was just a long branch from a bush. After a long time of fishing, none of us even had a bite. We ate our lunches but had brought no water with us, so we got thirstier and thirstier as the day wore on. In those days, the inter-urban train line ran beside the creek and we started walking our bikes along the track. It was a long way, but we finally got to a store and asked the clerk if we could please have glasses of water. How thankful and relieved we were when she gave each one of us a glassful of clear, cool water.
To this day, I look back at that time as the thirstiest I have ever been in my life. However, that physical thirst cannot compare to the spiritual thirst I had when I prayed to the Lord for my salvation. Day after day I prayed, but nothing happened. I guess I expected the Lord to hit me over the head with something, but that never happened.
I had prayed a number of times through the years, always with the same result. This time, I told the Lord I was not giving up, no matter if I felt anything or not. Ten days passed. Then one evening I left church and began reading a sermon. It was the last sermon ever preached by a veteran minister of the Gospel. He said, “Faith is something you can’t see, something you can’t feel. It comes right down from God out of Heaven.” That very moment God put faith in my heart, and I knew I was saved. I woke my mother in the other bedroom to tell her the prayers she had faithfully prayed for me through the years had been answered. That was over fifty years ago, and I have never doubted it since.
Are you having trouble believing some promise of God? When we have the thirst mentioned in today’s focus verse, we can be certain that God will fill us.